Water Meters - Good or Bad?

Water Meter - The Case For Welsh Water (Dŵr Cymru) supply our potable water and take away our sewerage and waste water. For 2020/21, the cost would be £1,143.92 based on the rateable value (RV) of the property. With only two of us living here now, the option to install a water meter, and just pay...

Making Vegetable Soups in a Vitamix Blender

Vegetable Soup in a Vitamix 5000 Blender The high power Vitamix range of food blenders have been around for nearly 100 years. We bought our model 5000 around ten years ago after seeing a demonstration at the Malvern Three Counties Showground in 2009 or 2010. Certainly not the cheapest on the market...

Return of the Nematodes - Slug and Snail Control

Slugs & Snails After the dry and sunny Spring 2020, the Met Office promised a day of drizzle at the beginning of meteorological summer. Ideal weather for applying slug nematodes in the Kitchen Garden. This biological treatment is my main line of defence against most gardener’s worst nightmare....

Additions to The Aviary

Things have progressed in the Aviary and there are some newcomers - also some jockeying for position. (link to previous article on the Aviary) We now have added: blue tit, woodpecker, robin and lesser black backed gull. The latter are pests in Hereford. They nest on chimney tops and fly round aggressively...

It’s a small world...

Last year one of my birthday presents (!) was a digital microscope. I’ve always enjoyed using them since my days at the John Innes Institute in the 1970s when I used one to look at the stages of pollen development in anthers - particularly tobacco and Datura - part of our work on pollen culture.The...

Potatoes and Photovoltaic Performance

Spring 2020 (March-April-May) was the sunniest since records began in 1929 according to the Met Office. This immediately followed the wettest February since rainfall records began in 1862 and it is very likely to be the driest May in England since 1896 (it is 30th May as I write this). And let’s not...